RTE: Losses may be €20 million this year. RTE boss meets Minister.

Seems the minister has ruled out a licence fee increase or communications charge and they are going to concentrate on evasion.

There's a very simple solution: Get Sky / UPC / Eir to collect the licence on their monthly bills - €13.30 per month.

The problem is An Post gets about €14 million a year to collect the licence and they want Sky / UPC / Eir to give them their customers details so An Post can continue to collect the licence.

An post made €8.6m in 2015, so the TV licence is sort of a subsidy for both RTE and An Post.

So if the minister solves the RTE problem, he creates a much bigger and political one with An Post.

One solution would be for An Post to 'process' the RTE licence fee, so Sky / UPC / Eir would collect the money, give it to An Post and An Post would get the €9.87 fee per licence, or a smaller amount for optics.

The real problem for RTE is that if their services were optional they would lose a massive amount of income.
Young people, foreigners, people who prefer the internet, would completely abandon RTE.
This would affect the quality of the programs and more people would switch off, a vicious circle.

But so what, in 5 or 10 years we will have very few print newspapers, if any - what's so special about RTE?

How can RTE report about the real world if they don't even live in it?

My biggest gripe with RTÉ (beside the Angelus of course...Dong Dong) is that the website does not update in the middle of the night if there is breaking news somewhere. There should always be someone on the newsteam 24/7 to update the site and App for very important breaking news stories.

My biggest gripe with RTÉ (beside the Angelus of course...Dong Dong) is that the website does not update in the middle of the night if there is breaking news somewhere. There should always be someone on the newsteam 24/7 to update the site and App for very important breaking news stories.

Personally, I'm happy to pay the license fee just for TG4 and Raidió na Gaeltachta. I would be willing to pay more than I do now. I never watch or listen to the English language services. The few times I'm forced to hear them, as when in a taxi for example, I'm sickened by what I hear.

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